Residencies '19 - '20

Elizabeth Corkery

During my six-week residency at Frans Masereel I was able to complete two bodies of work with quite diverse thematic concerns and production. The first, Establishing Shots II is a series of five etching and silkscreen prints. This five-print series draws from screengrabs taken of movies that offer cinematic representations of the garden. Through collecting a cataloging movies and television programs whose iconic scenes are set amidst formal gardens, I have been able to identify similar formal elements that form a kind of vocabulary for cinema's depictions of garden environments. Using the vernacular of the architectural engraving, I have been recreating these scenes at a small, intimate scale that is purposefully at odds with the sweeping visual scope of the original films and moves the scenes from the temporal into the pictorial. Their dimensions relate to the aspect ratio of the film as viewed and captured on my laptop.

The second series, titled Hollywood Hills was inspired by the work of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri and his constant inquiry into the fiction of photography. The prints in this collection similarly look to explore the disruption between the world and its representations. The seemingly monumental, mountainous images in the series are actually from photos taken of the giant snow mounds that built up around Boston during the recent ‘polar-vortex’. Documented from certain angles and specifically framed, these snowy accumulations come to resemble an epic mountain range.